A
FEW impressions gleaned from a ten minute browse (I did not
want to buy the book). The book uses a large typeface; of
its 336 pages only about 240 are text. A book is "stretched"
this way to make it appear more substantial than it is, but
in this case stretching did not even put it in the same
league as the most slender Harry Potter book. The book seems
to have been printed on acid-free paper that guarantees that
it will still be readable 500 years from now, but I think
that was an unnecessary provision in this case.

The book is in five sections: two are devoted to
Hitler
and the Jews, one to Holocaust Denial, one to Dresden,
and a chapter to the Judgment of the trial. There are
copious endnotes, but Evans does not use them to touch on
digressive matters or expand his thinking, unlike, for
example, Peter Novick, David Irving himself,
and others. Thus there's little to chew on besides the
text.

The text itself is a rehash of the expert report Evans
that provided for the Lipstadt defense, delivered in a
diffident and chatty tone. At least in this respect, Evans
seems to have modulated the rhetoric that marred his
expert opinions on David
Irving and Joel
Hayward.

This milder approach is evident in the section on
Holocaust Denial, which occupies some forty-five pages in
the middle of the book. Evans now takes pains to avoid the
spittle-flying name-calling that characterizes most authors
on the subject. "Deniers", as he calls them, are described
relatively fairly; there are references to Arthur
Butz and Robert
Faurisson, and Evans resists the temptation to call
the revisionists names, e.g., crackpots, and fruitcakes -- a
temptation which Peter Novick was not able to resist.

Evans also avoids ascribing moral or political agendas to
revisionists. In this chapter, as throughout the book,
however, Evans uses Holocaust Denial to attack Irving. He
emphasizes particular elements of "Denial", like the number
of victims, or the penchant of revisionists to use ridicule.
By going through the videotaped lectures
of Irving, he then finds material to fit his own definition,
and behold, he has found a "Holocaust denier". The quantity
of either detail or actual argument is slender.

Perhaps needless to say, I could find nothing in this
book find anything about the controversies surrounding the
missing "holes
in the roof of Crematorium II" at Auschwitz, or the air
raid shelters either.

Auschwitz expert Robert van Pelt himself will be
sore to find that he rates only two entries in the book's
index: on page 199, for example, that Pelt recommended that
Evans not look Irving in the eye, in order to avoid "getting
angry."

I walked away from the bookstore disappointed. With most
of the book taken up by materials on Dresden, Holocaust
Denial, and the Judgment
in the Lipstadt-Irving case, it seems almost dishonesty in
advertising to call this book Lying About Hitler.

The main character of the book is not Hitler at all, but
David Irving. Perhaps Lying About David Irving would
have been a better indication of the book's contents. --
Samuel Crowell.